Introducing the Community Cookbook
Introduction
Community cookbooks are cookbooks produced by multiple individuals who share common characteristics or interests. Other names for this type of publication include fundraising, regional, and charitable cookbooks. Contributors or authors of these dishes in these cookbooks identify themselves with their recipes and sometimes offer short vignettes that further explain themselves or their community. Community cookbook authors often share common traits – usually habitation in a town or region, together with other social features such as class, race, occupation, area of residence, area of education, culture, or participation in a club or organization. Typically members sell the cookbooks to raise funds for local causes. Recipes contained in the cookbooks and the reasoning behind their publication can reveal much about the authors and their communities.History and Characteristics
The first known instance of a community cookbook occurred during the American Civil War, but there are conflicting stories about how it came to be. One origin story claims that unknown Northern women wanted to raise funds to support the Sanitation Commission of the Union Army, and thus published what became the first community cookbook to do so. Another origin story cites the source as Maria J. Moss, author of A Poetical Cookbook, who published her cookbook in 1864 to raise money for injured Union soldiers. Shortly thereafter, churches, synagogues, and political parties began publishing cookbooks for their own causes. Among religiously-based authors, dedicating their cookbooks to quasi- (or non-) religious purposes was customary. Suffragists utilized community cookbooks to spread their messages to other women. Until recently, most writers of community cookbooks were female and wrote as a means of supporting valuable organizations and for personal development, friendship, and cultural stimulation.3 Today in 2023, as a direct result of the isolation produced by the Covid-19 pandemic, community cookbooks have rebounded, with people bonding over shared experiences and exchanged comfort in the form of tried-and-true recipes present in these cookbooks that they share in this format.Community cookbooks possess many features that identify them as what literary theorists have sometimes called minor literature, alternative public spaces, or physical embodiments of foodways. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have identified three features of minor literature which we can apply to community cookbooks: (1) it frees readers from dominant, formal language forms by using stripped-down, straightforward language to evoking sensory reactions, in the case of recipes, while discussing preparation, serving, or consumption of a dish; (2) the work is intrinsically political, even if its political elements are not obvious; (3) everything presented within the cookbook such as imagery, advertisements, and vignettes form a collective value that the “community” supports. In their community cookbook recipes, authors incorporate history, class, region, theology, identity, and family into their definition of community. Community cookbooks encourage interaction between authors, authors and their communities, and authors and their readers as an alternative public space. Participation in the recipes through viewing, following recipes, and sharing the final products becomes a way to remain connected and active in the community. Foodways are defined as the intersection of food and culture, all aspects of food which are culture-based, as well as all aspects of culture which use or refer to food. Through community cookbooks, foodways bind individuals and define a group’s identity, form one regional character from culture and geography, and underlie group solidarity. Historically, community cookbooks possessed common themes of assimilation and maintaining specific social qualities, so authors of these works have tended to highlight certain morals, values, and pieces of advice.
As scholars of community cookbooks have shown themes of race, class, and womanhood underlie many recipes in community cookbooks, intentionally or inadvertently. Racial communalism, the division between people based on race, can be due to simple phenomena like familial lineage and complex phenomena like their ethnic identity. Recipes of community cookbooks contain many insights into the racial and ethnic identities of their authors through interpretation, repetition, and composition. Class presents itself in people’s shopping habits, food preparation techniques, and with whom contributors share their meals. In community cookbooks, class may gain expression through the identification of ingredients, traditions, and more. In developing such cookbooks, women may create communities of “gustatory independence” and form new sisterhoods of racial and socioeconomic origins, according to political scientist Kennan Ferguson.
Case Study: The Sephardic Heritage Cookbook
Produced by the Sephardic Temple Or Chadash Sisterhood of Sephardic Temple Tiffereth Israel, based in Los Angeles, California, the Sephardic Heritage Cookbook possesses all the traits of a community cookbook. The authors, who refer to themselves as the Cookbook Club members in the Preface, are predominantly women. They created this cookbook out of the desire to “transmit to their children and grandchildren the special tastes and techniques that they remember from their family kitchens.” Each author attends services at this temple but possesses a different cultural background. In the past generation, membership has expanded to include Jewish families from Iran, Morocco, Egypt, Israel, and the Caribbean. New members have joined families whose relatives came to the United States from Turkey and Greece (and especially from Rhodes) more than a century ago.Recipes provide directions – offering practical, hands-on advice – while also describing the results for those who may want to read and imagine, but not necessarily make, the recipes themselves. Exploring the White-Bread Challah recipe, directions tell readers to rely on their senses to determine if they prepared the dough correctly before baking. Phrases such as “foam slightly”, “easy to handle”, and “until dark golden brown” exist in key places throughout the recipe. The author of this challah recipe, Elaine Lindheim, intends to guide readers to the final product using these sensory-focused instructions. In explaining the “why” of the recipe, Elaine tells the story of her grandparents and their wooden mixing bowl that has moved from generation to generation. Her grandparents were from Izmir, Turkey, but their descendants reside in California. Her family bakes the bread, in its various forms (crown or rectangular loaves), for various holidays such as Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. Elaine incorporates religion, history, identity, and family into the foundation of this recipe. In sharing this recipe, she is paying homage to her Sephardic community at her temple, her mother, her mother’s mother and other ancestors, and her daughter. Furthermore, her culturally-based dish binds her to other Sephardic Jews, creating a group solidarity that expands beyond neighborhood boundaries.
Conclusion
In short, community cookbooks are more than a group project. They reflect a long history of togetherness to better the lives of community members. They use food to bind people together.Works Cited
Ferguson, Kennan. Cookbook Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.Ferguson, Kennan. “Intensifying Taste, Intensifying Identity: Collectivity through Community Cookbooks,” Signs, 37:3 (2012), pp. 695-717.
Krishna, Priya. "A Community Cookbook Comeback," The New York Times, April 29, 2020.
Mastrangelo, Lisa. “Community Cookbooks: Sponsors of Literacy and Community Identity,” Community Literacy Journal, 10:1 (2015), pp. 73–86.
Nussel, Jill. "Heating Up the Sources: Using Community Cookbooks in Historical Inquiry," History Compass, 4:5 (2006), pp. 956-961.Sephardic Temple Or Chadash Sisterhood, Sephardic Heritage Cookbook. South Carolina: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016.